Greetings! You may call me Doctor Pseudonymous. Because that is my name. Too often have I heard some horror and fantasy movies described as so strange they must be from another universe. Indeed, they are from another universe! I have perfected a way to travel from my universe, designated Universe-Prime, to your strange and primitive Universe-X to set you straight about these movies. Prepare to reconsider your senseless views on cinema.

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Scary Digits: Box Office Update for August 10, 2017

Interactive Box Office Graphs

I set up an interactive tool to look at box office data for horror movies (using a loose definition of horror movie). The tool shows a graph with data on budgets and box office grosses, including U.S. opening weekend, U.S. after opening, and foreign box office totals. Moving your mouse over the graph (or tapping on mobile devices) provides detailed information about each movie. The interactive tool is available at the link below. (You can bookmark that page if you find it useful.)

Box Office Update for August 10, 2017

The graph below is a non-interactive image taken from the interactive tool. If you look at the light green bars, which show non-U.S. grosses for movies, it is very clear that some of the big studio movies that performed poorly or moderately in the U.S. (Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Kong: Skull Island, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, The Mummy) were massive international hits.

Look at The Mummy in particular. With a budget of $125M, the movie opened with only $31.7M and has only grossed $79.9M in the U.S. Outside the U.S., The Mummy has grossed $322.3M for a total gross of $402.3M (more than 3 times its budget). Less than 20% of its box office has come from the U.S.

Contrast The Mummy with Get Out, a huge hit in the U.S., but a movie for which about 70% of its box office came from the U.S. The contrast between low-budget and high-budget movies, especially in the horror (and horror-related) genre, seems to be getting starker and starker. Big-budget releases are either growing more dependent on, or taking more advantage of, foreign box office than ever before.